Frontier Science relies on M10 servers and ETERNUS DX200 storage for data processing and medical research

"The Fujitsu M10 server is not only much faster; it’s also much more scalable to handle our future growth. We’re currently using just 50 percent of the cores but can easily add more as demand for more virtual machines increases."

Peter Meszynski,
IT Director, Frontier Science

The customer

Frontier Science is a not-for-profit research foundation established in 1975 to advance the application of statistical science and data management techniques in science, health care, and education. The Foundation is incorporated in the State of New York and has US-based offices in Amherst, New York; Boston, Massachusetts and Madison, Wisconsin.

The Foundation is engaged in large-scale national and international clinical trials, many of which have had direct impact upon the treatment of patients with various diseases, particularly AIDS and cancer, throughout the world. The Foundation has done this work through both private and public sector collaborations. In conjunction with these activities, the Foundation has developed software and general computing techniques specifically tailored to the needs of data collection, categorization and analysis.

The challenge

Frontier Science’s aging SPARC server platforms were reaching end of life and were failing to keep up with increased demands. Frontier Science needed a new more powerful SPARC-based solution in order to maintain optimal reliability while avoiding the costs associated with porting its data and applications. It also needed systems with considerably lower power demands in order to deploy them more easily to geographically separated sites called for by its customers.

The solution

Frontier Science has implemented multiple Fujitsu M10-4 and M10-1 servers at several sites. It has also installed Fujitsu ETERNUS DX200 storage solutions at each location. These include production systems as well as segregated development and testing systems.

The benefit

Vastly reduced power consumption means the cost of outsourcing server locations has decreased dramatically while opening more sites for consideration

Improved performance of up to 70 percent enables complex reports to be produced in real-time, and data can be validated and processed much more quickly

The optimal availability of the servers mean that critical services, tools and data are available 24/7 to a large number of researchers around the world

Built-in scalability allows the server solution to grow seamlessly, and new virtual machines can be added as and when required